Tuesday, January 27, 2015

FMW 12c: In-depth look into Managed File Transfer (1/3)

With the release of SOA Suite 12c a new product was revealed. The
first sighting was at Oracle OpenWorld 2013. On the Fusion Middleware
Demo Grounds there was a demo shown where B2B was integrated with a
product called Managed File Transfer (shortened as MFT). At that same conference I gave a presentation
about this product together with the product manager of MFT, Dave
Berry. This blog gives an in-depth look into Managed File Transfer.

There
is a growing problem with FTP in the enterprise where there is a lack
of control, visibility, security and reliability. The lack of control
is due to the uncontrolled proliferation of FTP servers & clients.
Departments are creating stand-alone FTP servers and configuring users
where needed. There is no central FTP server. Because of this there is
no global visibility of the exchange of crucial data
files – including customer data. It is highly possible that these FTP
servers are not integrated with enterprise security
standards where as FTP servers are rarely integrated with directories.
Because these FTP servers run stand-alone they are a single point of
failure and rarely offer HA capabilities, which effects the reliability. This can be tackled using Managed File Transfer.

What is Managed File Transfer?

MFT
is a simple and secure End-to-End Managed File Gateway. At the base MFT
uses an “Embedded” (S)FTP / SSH server which support HA clustering. MFT
has a scalable architecture, which mean it can easily be expanded by
adding another Weblogic node to the cluster. It also includes an
extensible framwork for pre/post processing of files. MFT integrates
with Standards Based Middleware like (S)FTP, SOA, B2B, Service Bus and
Web Services.

Managed File Transfer has support file delivery of
very large files ~ 500GB+ which can be ZIP compressed/decompressed and
encrypted and decrypted using PGP encrypting. One main feature is the
possibility to send files via Web Services using Pass-by-Reference
(Claim/Check pattern). It can be a reference to a FTP or File location,
but there is also inline (base64) support. File transfers can be
scheduled and delivery to target endpoints can be paused, resumed and
resubmitted. If delivery fails then files can automatically be retried.
MFT can send notifications when files are delivered or when transfers
fail. Deliveries can be done through HTTP, JCA, FTP or in-memory.
Managed File Transfer support (custom) callouts to archive, move and
delete files.

Transactions can be audited and monitored using the
included Web UI for designing, monitoring and administration of
transfers. With this lightweight Web based Design-Time Interface you can
easily build, edit and deploy end-to-end transfers. I will go into all
the details a bit later on.

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About Me

Robert is a Senior Oracle Integration Specialist and Oracle ACE Associate with an emphasis on building service-oriented business processes. Robert has over 7 years of experience in Oracle's SOA Suite and Oracle's Service Bus.
His current interests are SOA-based IoT (Internet Of Things) solutions and SOA Suite 11g/12c (BPEL, Service Bus, OEP, MFT).